ABSTRACT
Higher education in Britain remains a ‘hideously white’1 place, rarely open to critical gaze (Back 2004). It is not a place you expect to find many ‘black bodies’.2 Being a body ‘out of place’ (Puwar 2001) in white institutions has emotional and psychological costs to the bearer of that difference. Simmonds, a black woman academic writes, ‘The world I inhabit as an academic is a white world . . . in this white world I am a fresh water fish that swims in sea water. I feel the weight of the water on my body’ (1997: 227).
